“So, this is it?” She staggers onto her feet, an elbow thrust against the wall for support. The new arms do not suit her, too bulky for her whip-lean frame. They slow her too. It is clear that synaptic cohesion hasn’t yet been achieved: the body and the prosthetics remain separate, one perpetually at risk of torquing apart from the other. “All those years of pretending we live outside the system. But at the end, we’re just that. Dogs. Bodies for the machine. We don’t get a say. We just do what they tell us to do. Fuck.”
I have spent forty years in the Conversation, a fugitive from the Penitents, a suicide driven to purgatory by the people meant to protect me, their palms blood-stained with my blood and Johanna’s blood, and so many other people dead, dead, dead.
“I have an idea. But you have to trust me.”
“Why the fuck should I?”
“Because we deserve second chances after everything that happened, and this is the only way we’re going to get them.”
“You could be lying to me.” Maya is chewing on her lower lip so hard, it is bleeding oil. “Fuck, you’ve got our backups as ransom.”
“I’m desperate.”
“So was Rita.”
“Please,” I say, and I pull out the stops, I use Rita’s cadences, the grift of her voice pitched low and needful. Sometimes, we use monsters to get to the end of our myths.
Or maybe, we become them.
“I can’t do this without you,” I say.
“God, it’s fucking weird to hear you say that while you’re wearing Rita like a . . . a . . . coat.”
“Please, Maya. I can’t do this if you’re not with me.”
She stares at me, eyes luminous with pain, and I wonder how many times Rita must have demanded the same from her, and how many times she has died because she said yes. And I know her answer before she says it, and I know, despite everything, who it is for.
“Please.”
“Fine. One last time.”
Sacrifice
Most of the lights in the crew quarters blew out long ago, long enough for the sockets to rust black, crusted with whatever filth comes calling after nearly half a century of wanton neglect. Still, a handful of decrepit bulbs persist in spitting a juddering glow over the room and, so illuminated, Ayane is nearly unrecognizable when Maya stalks in.
“Don’t bring me back,” Ayane says without turning, body curled into a comma, bituminous armor and unkempt hair. An arm is exposed within that nictitating light, sanitized of all flesh, actuators and bare tungsten planes, orbited by several macrocosms of sensory drones. “Tell them I don’t want to come back.”
“Hello to you too.”
Ayane stoops a glance down her shoulder, smile encoded and without any of its normal coquetry. The absence of the latter has Maya disconcerted, which pisses her off more than she’d ever admit. Never once has Maya petitioned the universe for compassion, keenly aware it’s a miser who gored its heart out at birth. But she thought they had a fucking understanding: in exchange for the beatings it doles out, she’d take her consolation prize in consistency. Cruelty is innate to the act of existence, but it’s bearable so long as you know the swing of the next blow. So, this: seeing Ayane’s façade shattered, seeing her shorn of her defenses, seeing her so rawly human and so heavy with whatever secret she is about to reveal, it infuriates Maya.
“I don’t want you all to bring me back. I don’t want to wake up in that fucking tank again, Maya. When I die, I want to stay dead.”
“Jesus fuck, I do not have the headspace to deal with whatever existential bullshit you’re going through. Not right now. I’m just here to tell you to fucking get ready to join us, or to stay put if you’re still halfway to dead. If you’re going to have a fucking meltdown, you better goddamned fucking—”
“No, I know the ageships are coming. I’ve been listening to Pimento’s reports.” Calm. Ayane is never so calm when Maya goes on her tirades. It takes a hot minute, but Maya recognizes that quietude for what it is: a monk in the process of mellification, an inmate having one final saunter down death row. “You’re going to need time to do whatever you fuckheads need to do. And I’m the only person who can do it for you. None of you shitbirds can work machinery the way I can. So, I’m going to go out there. And I’m going to buy you time, got it? And when you’re done, if you survive the bullshit, don’t bring me back. Make sure everyone knows I don’t want to come back. Erase my code. Burn the copies. Let me stay dead this time when it happens.”
“Is this about Johanna?”
“Fuck yeah it’s about Johanna. Who the hell else would it be about? I’ve spent forty years trying to move on. Believe me, I fucking tried. But my world ended with her. She was my everything. I should have realized forty years ago that I didn’t want to be here without her, didn’t want to live in a world where she wasn’t there. But you know what? Hindsight can fucking blow me.”
“I don’t know if Johanna would have wanted you to kill yourself in a grand gesture. And,” she hesitates. “What about Verdigris?”
“Forty years, Maya.” There it is. A gleam of Ayane’s old intractable self, however corroded its brilliance. “I had forty years to figure out what I want to do with myself, and truth is? I’m tired. We had a good run. We scorched our names into history. We’ve done everything anyone can hope to do except maybe have kids, a house, some nice woman who’ll love us despite all the blood on our hands.”
“Rochelle made it.”
“See? You’re proving my point. There’s nothing left for us. Well, for me. If you get your shit together, you might get a happily-ever-after with Verdigris. Man, I’d almost stick around to see that. You and Verdigris living that intergalactic superstar life. In plain fucking sight of the cosmos. God, you’d probably drive her stylist insane too.” Finally, she turns so Maya can regard her in full, and she is a ruin of metal and synthetic dermal layers, circuitry a softly glinting nebula of lace. Her abdomen is opened like cathedral doors, innards—pale plastic entrails and more resilient counterparts, disorientingly sensual in the wolf-light—bared like holy relics. Nanomachines weave between the folds of her organs, priests in the body of their god.
“I don’t know if I’m the happily-ever—”
“Don’t be an asshole. Let me dream about happy endings for the people I care about.”
Maya swallows, then says: “You didn’t answer my question about Verdigris.”
Ayane pauses what she’s doing. “What about Verdigris?”
“Verdigris would have issues with you dying.”
“Yeah, I don’t like that I’m going to do this to Verdigris, even if Verdigris will understand. Get over it one day. Our arrangement has always been about mutual happiness. And frankly, I don’t think Verdigris is the kind of person who’d tell me to keep hanging around when my time is done.” Laughter silvers the lilt of her voice, a little bitter, but otherwise genuine in its amusement. With care, Ayane begins welding the paneling along her chest shut. “Think of it this way: my body, my fucking rules.”
“Don’t you care about Verdigris?”
“Of course, I fucking do. I cared enough to back out of Verdigris’ life. No one needs to be in love with someone who can’t stop moping over a dead woman.”
“Verdigris never told me that.”
“Verdigris has always been a class act.”
“I still can’t let you do this—”
“You’ve shot me in the fucking head more times than I can count. Don’t get squeamish on me.”
“Yeah, but.”
“Pimento and I are going to cannibalize Butcher of Eight the moment Elise makes the jump. They have enough sub-minds in them for me to be able to make a fucking mess of the Bethel. And you know what? I just like the fact I’ll get to go out taking an ageship with me.”
“I’m not going to be able to make you change your mind, am I?”
“You had to kill me to get me to come with you on this idiot mission.” Ayane grins, feral, the pretty flensed from her face. In t
he dim light, she is monstrous, perfect as the last round you didn’t think you had, the muzzle-flash in lieu of the click of an empty chamber. “So no, you’re not changing my mind.”
Hollowed of her go-tos, Maya stands there, nonetheless, aware a statement—any statement—must be made.
“I’m sorry I shot you.”
“You gotta be more specific.”
“At . . . the, whatever the fuck that was, the place where you had all those fights. I’m sorry I got it blown up too.”
Ayane fixes her with a lupine grin. “Seriously, Maya, don’t get soft on me. Let me remember you as my favorite nemesis.”
There was nothing to do after that except bare a matching grin, a last stand of a smile, one with more guns than sense, pure back-to-the-wall snarling defiance at the apocalypse. This was how the Dirty Dozen rolled.
And this was how they were going to go out.
Not with a whimper but with a scream that’ll still echo when the doors of hell shut and the gates of heaven are nailed closed, because when the universe goes low, the Dirty Dozen teaches it what it means to really rumble. Two shots to the trunk, one to the head, and a Hail Mary of another dozen because why the fuck not? Maya swallows whatever else she might have said, trusting that somewhere there’s a god of speaking the quiet parts out loud, and the look she flashes Ayane is both grief-tumbled and glorious.
“Let’s rock.”
Comeback Queens
“You’re in my fucking spot.”
Maya struts into the cockpit, attitude locked and loaded, gun arm primed to go, all three of the Erinyes balled up into one foul-tempered motherfucker, and she cannot believe the shit she walks into. There are Constance and Verdigris trying to wire up the old cop to a console, the former weeping blood from the starmap of their bare back.
Verdigris glances over, screwdriver clutched between her teeth.
“Excuse me?” he mouths around the tool.
“No offense, darling, but your surgical skills aren’t as good as your singing. And we all know law enforcement makes people soft.”
“I swear to god, Maya—” says Constance.
“I’ve got this. You two can go hit the bench.”
Clack. Clack. Clack.
“I d-did not say it was only you that I needed,” says Rita-Elise, joining them, looking less like a penitentiary, the sclera having blown up, the white gone to carbonized red. “Dimmuborgir c-contains multiple sub-sections. We’d need a person o-verseeing e-each node.”
“Convenient that you made sure to find the exact number,” says Constance.
“I d-did not say we will have everything under control. But four? Four of us will be able to make a mark. I—”
“Yeah, about that,” says Maya. “Ayane’s not coming.”
Verdigris lowers the screwdriver.
“What are you talking about? Is she staying on the ship?”
“Ayane.” Maya hesitates. “Ayane is going to buy us some time while we get set up.”
Constance is the first to speak up, first to clap a warm hand on Verdigris’ trembling shoulder. “She probably has a good reason.”
“No,” says Verdigris softly.
“She explained it all,” says Maya. “And this definitely is the best way.”
“No,” says Verdigris again.
“The Butcher of Eight is one of the biggest ageships among the Minds, one of the baddest the Bethel have in their arsenal. If she and Pimento can take them over, they can keep the other ageships off us until we can do what we need to do.”
“No,” says Verdigris again, and her voice cracks this third time. “She’s going to die.”
“I think that’s the point,” says Maya, with more softness than she ever fucking thought she could carry. “Ayane’s . . . tired. She says she’s done with this world. She’s sorry, I think, for hurting you. But she’s done. Johanna—”
Verdigris rocks her head to one side and another, finger raised to bar the advent of more awkward platitudes. Thank god. Maya wasn’t manufactured for palliative conversation. “Fine. She knows what’s best for her. If this is what she feels like she needs to do, I respect that.”
“She’s always been a complete drama queen,” says Maya.
Impossibly: laughter between the three, sororial, sweet with relief, without even a beat for grief, and that is despite knowing Ayane’s preparing to euthanize herself by way of confronting an entire armada. Maybe it’s because there’s no better death than the one you pick? The permutations of maybe, what-if, finally laid to rest. Maybe that’s what anyone should aspire to, could aspire to: the steadiness of spirit, sureness in each singular moment.
Maya threads her fingers with Verdigris, pulls her close, sees for a second a flicker of shock on that laughing face.
And she kisses him.
She kisses her in bold and transparent sight of everyone else because fuck everything, fuck the last two hundred years, fuck all that pain, fuck holding back, Maya is so done with that shit; she kisses him like the world’s ending, like it’s okay, like this is the first time and it is the last time and like she’d do this—every death, every shot-up lung, every gashed-open belly, every occasion she has spent panting, bleeding from a gut wound, dying by degrees—all again.
“It’s going to hurt—we don’t have the equipment to make the interfacing painless, and are you sure—”
“Yeah. Do it.”
“It might kill you.”
“Nothing worse than Rita’s ever done to me.”
“Fine, fine. We’ll see you on the other side—”
A voice crackles on the intercom: pleasant tenor, indelibly familiar, excellent pronunciation, every word articulated exactly as it had been constructed. A radio voice, as they once described it on the planet where it all began. “Synchronization completed. Welcome to Dimmuborgir.”
The HUD switches on. You see an entire cosmos of computational processes being rendered in real time, a billion variables savagely recalibrated to the matrices that you supplied. The chaos eddies and resolves into a clean overlay, all crucial information neatly stacked in the margins to prevent any risk of obfuscating the view.
It is midnight. You stand under the hull of a dead ship, an overhang of scorched alloy and drooling wires. A single neon beacon skewers the rock beneath. Your hijacked corpus presents no opposition, pleasantly dazed, its sub-processes subsumed by algorithmic sedatives, security functions plied by lies. It will do.
In the distance: contrails from explosions in the stratosphere and occasional glisters, as though of someone finger-painting with salt upon the black.
You—the word snags on a fallacy, an error in your code. The database from which it should be drawn is corrupted, or at least temporarily out of commission. You, as you knew it, is absent of nuance. You, as you must have known it, no longer exists. But no matter.
Gingerly, you—a blank slate, excited by a goal it scarcely remembers—run diagnostics on your drone. Humanoid model: no upgrades, factory-standard down to the limited palate. You can work with this, however. Emotional distance simplifies the excursion. You remember this from—
You—
You—
Maya, wake up.
“Pimento, can you do something? We’re going to lose her to the machine.”
What was your mother’s maiden name?
Were you an only child?
What is the name of your first love?
Rita.
You—
No, no, fuck that second-person absence of autonomy, Maya clawing back to herself, the name Rita like an anchor although she hasn’t yet figured out why, the memories eeling out of reach: a melting zoetrope of moments, patched over the sense something is wrong, something is missing, and there is simultaneously too much and too little for her to parse the deluge.
But, really.
In the beginning, there was the Word and the Word was, shouted, not spoken, screamed from the ledge of eternity, that liminal region between meat and machine—
“Fuck.”
Fuck was the word that Maya bayed as her consciousness sharpened into focus again.
What is your name?
First name: Maya. Last name: None of your fucking business. Don’t ask her shit like you don’t know the answer is a bullet. Maya, too long asleep, somnambulating to the tune of a piper who’d never loved her, only wanted to drown her, so fuck that, Maya, she swims upstream along the data, bursting through the wires.
“How are you doing, Constance? You holding up okay?”
“My wetware’s just fine, bitch.”
Maya laughs, giddy. Up, up she goes.
Or was it down?
“The Bethel are coming.” Verdigris. “Ayane did what she could.”
Ayane, say the four in heartbroken tandem, Verdigris keening her grief into the undersong.
But she died for her reasons, one of which was to give them space to move.
And so Maya does, the last to get to her appointed space.
“Everyone here?” says Elise.
“I’m here,” Verdigris whispers. “Jesus, is this what ageships feel like all the time?”
“Yeah,” says Elise.
“The fuck?” Constance, laughing themself into a stutter of light.
“Where’s Rita?” says Maya.
Before Elise can answer, the knowledge seeps through, a cascade of images: a silhouette in the furnace, embryonic. Rita Rita Rita, sings that old melody, and her heart yammers a desperate case, demanding they go to her, that they save her, that she needs Maya, needs her bad, and what good is a gun without someone telling it where to shoot?
“Is she in pain?” Maya asks.
Verdigris, resting imaginary fingers on Maya’s non-existent wrist. “Does it matter?”
To Maya’s surprise, she says:
“No.”
What the fuck are you doing? The Merchant Mind, hissing into their com-link.
None of them answer. Maya finds where she is meant to go, shattering into partitions, tunnelling into machinery the size of continents, and she is colossal. She is everything. She is the divine made metal. She is fury remade in steel.
The All-Consuming World Page 24
